(mashedmarket)

This is America. … When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y’know what?

There’s still a damn lot of stuff we do better than anyone else.

Welcome to mashedmarket. I’m mtvernon.

I love Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but not for “Reason” or the concept of a metaverse. No — I love what William Gibson terms “fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the 21st century.”

In other words: astonishingly weird cultural byproducts tend to steal my heart. And, like Dylan Ebdus in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, I’ve got a particular fondness for the “middle spaces” that these sorts of consumable culture sometimes “[conjure] and [dwell] in.” I’ll be exploring those gray areas right here.

Join me as I scratch that niche between impression and reality.

Thanks for reading!